This book provides a very thorough presentation of symmetric and public key Cryptography, with a very present focus on provable security, and in particular, game-based security. This is a challenging, but also rewarding introduction to a very rigorous kind of Cryptography. The book also features plenty of exercises, which present a pretty wide range of situations, and really help to flesh out all of the nooks and crannies of the material.

The main downside of this book is that it’s not finished yet. This is a pretty big problem, actually, because one consequence is that there are no references to the existing literature, which is quite annoying. This book would easily be 10 times more useful if it had those references, because it would act as an even greater stepping stone to get into the literature on Cryptography. Some of the advertised future sections on Cryptographic protocols would be great as well, since that’s an area that doesn’t have as much focus throughout the rest of these books.

Nonetheless, I think this book is such a good and challenging read that I have to recommend it to everyone who wants to dive deep into Cryptography, but I hope it does get finished sometime soon.